Police in front of the place where the truck was found in October 2019 in Grays, near London. – Alastair Grant
Thirteen arrests took place Tuesday in Ile-de-France as part of the investigation into the discovery in October 2019, in England, of the bodies of 39 dead Vietnamese migrants
in a refrigerated truck, announced this Wednesday the Paris prosecutor’s office. The prosecution did not specify the nationalities of those arrested, but a source familiar with the matter, these suspects are mainly Vietnamese.
A total of 26 arrests took place on the same day. Eleven Vietnamese and two Moroccans were indeed arrested Tuesday in Belgium as part of the same investigation, announced the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office. “The network set up by traffickers is suspected of having transported up to several dozen people every day for several months,” he said.
An international impact
On October 23, 2019, the corpses of 31 men and 8 women, including two 15-year-old adolescents, were discovered in a container in the industrial area of Grays, east of London. The container came from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge. The survey is being carried out jointly by Great Britain, Ireland, France and Belgium. In the British investigation, five people have already been charged, including Maurice Robinson, 25, the driver of the truck intercepted in Grays. The latter had pleaded guilty of manslaughter in early April to a London court.
This drama, which has international repercussions, has highlighted the dangers of illegal immigration, with unscrupulous traffickers taking advantage of the vulnerability of candidates, often promised precarious jobs in a state of semi-slavery in the United Kingdom.
